The process of death and the process of birth are very similar. The difference is who is waiting on the other side.
In November I made the profoundly wrong decision to winter in New Mexico. I didn’t realize at the time that I was choosing a state that would order some of the strictest government mandates that remain in place some 5 months later (and counting).
There’s a crummy walking path nearby that I go to less often than I should. Walking is my preferred exercise, but I’ve developed agoraphobia from encountering so many masked people outside. The government mandate, unsubstantiated by any peer-reviewed scientific studies, states that one is required to wear a mask outside only if one cannot maintain 6 feet of distance from others, but people who are more interested in moral posturing, with its correlative gesture of shaming, cannot be bothered to 1) read the emergency order (which is currently being challenged in court) or 2) keep their opinions to themselves. Today a bicyclist felt it was within his scope to make me feel ashamed for wanting to breathe oxygen while I am exercising. The hand gesture he made as he biked away was contrary to reason as only men can masturbate that way.
Perhaps the only thing I’ve consistently found in New Mexico are a few healers who support my healing from past trauma. A pattern that repeats from birth until sometime within the past 6 -12 months is my surprising willingness to accept certain other’s definitions of how I should behave. By this I don’t mean government authorities, or any authority figures for whom I harbor a deep and abiding animosity. I mean going along to get along with friends, lovers, and relatives. However, given how easily they have at various moments shut the door on me, I can see now how those were substandard relationships. My acceptance of their conditions spoke more to my loneliness/fear of solitude than to whether their scanty affections served to fulfill my needs and desires.
It’s quite humbling to have more years behind one than ahead and realize that there have been only one or two relationships that truly supported me. All of the rest were contingent on me not making someone uncomfortable with my opinions or behaviors. Part of my healing now involves affirming what I value every day. That includes believing that I am responsible for my health as others are for theirs and that human relationships should not be negotiated through the transhumanist terms dictated by such players as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Big Tech, and Big Pharma.
If people who acted as if they cared for me in the past would only do so based on conditions that might change at any moment, what benefit would I derive from looking for solace in such communities as Santa Fe or the state of New Mexico or the government of the United States or the corporate-captured global community? And yet that’s what I’m being told to do when I am harassed to wear a useless mask, shelter in place, and get vaccinated. “We’re all in this together,” the electronic billboards posted along the highways hum.
No matter how many times it’s repeated, a lie remains a lie. People such as that bicyclist have not have their worlds ripped apart. They’ve been telecommuting and zooming, ordering from Amazon and Instacart, and putting a mask on or not being able to take a cruise are their only inconveniences. Some, frankly, have been waiting a long time for some “older and wiser” figure who looks adult-like to tell them to wear a mask and give up their freedoms. Freedom after all is quite exhausting.
Perhaps at this historical moment there are more people like them than are like me. That’s what the powers-that-be are counting on. But one day that could just as easily be different. If they think they are immune, they are fooling themselves.
Sadly, schadenfreude projected into the future is not an emotion that’s going to sustain me. What I would prefer, as Dr. Northrup’s quotation above implies, is to have been born into a world where one is welcomed by a community with love and support for what one brings to the world – one’s unique self – and not marked as being a biosecurity risk. Short of that, I’m still holding out hope that there are still some people who feel the same and that one day our paths will cross, maskless.